Samuel Butler Quotes

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.

all people with any pretence to respectability to send their children to some one or other of these schools, mulcting them of years of money. It astonished me to see what sacrifices the parents would make in order to render their children as nearly useless as possible; and it was hard to say whether the old suffered most from the expense which they were thus put to, or the young from being deliberately swindled in some of the most important branches of human inquiry, and directed into false channels or left to drift in the great majority of cases.

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know he is dead.

Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.

We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.

Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name.

It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of.

I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for a very little moment. They soon reach a height from which they begin to decline, and when they have begun to decline it is a pity that they cannot be knocked on the head; for an art is like a living organism — better dead than dying.

There are two classes of people in this world, those who sin, and those who are sinned against; if a man must belong to either, he had better belong to the first than to the second.

I suppose in reality not a leaf goes yellow in autumn without ceasing to care about its sap and making the parent tree very uncomfortable by long growling and grumbling - but surely nature might find some less irritating way of carrying on business if she would give her mind to it. Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account?

La vida es el arte de sacar conclusiones suficientes a partir de datos insuficientes.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

If people who are in a difficulty will only do the first little reasonable thing which they can clearly recognize as reasonable, they will always find the next step more easy both to see and take.

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.